Stir-up Sunday, the first day of Christmas baking!

Hello!

I have been meaning to write a blog for some time but needed a good idea to run with. It presented itself fully-formed however this morning while preparing the ingredients for my mother's Christmas pudding - a countdown to Christmas, sharing with you all my cooking, baking and general craftyness (triumphal or disastrous), over the next five weeks.

One of my motives for doing this is that most Christmases, I leave everything too late and run out of time to make anything nice but this year I'd like that to change. It would be lovely to also hear from others what they plan to do, and share ideas on making Christmas 2011 a decent one!

I write this still needing to finish the last of my three cooking projects for today, but here are a few photos from the stir-up Sunday task of making the Christmas pudding, and a finished batch of mince pies, just out of the oven.

More details to come, I hope you'll join me in my countdown!

 Kate

Zesting an unwaxed lemon - if you compare the smell with that of a waxed one, there's such a difference!

 Frenzied whisking of stout, egg and treacle. Not the tastiest of mixtures...

 Making sure to give the ingredients a good old stir

 And there we have it! An upside-down, uncooked look at what it'll be like on Christmas day. Fake holly, can you tell? (I can guess the answer).

 Too tired to photograph anything other than the finished result, lots of zesting, rolling, cutting, shaping, spooning and brushing! I tend to experiment each year with recipes, and this year have gone for an orange pastry, courtesy of the Hairy Bikers. I like their straightforward approach, though they didn't mention how thin or thick to roll the pastry, and the tops are a bit too thick, so plenty of improvement to be made with batch two I think.

Three cast-offs for tasting, by myself and my Christmas Kitchen Helper (a.k.a 'Mother').

The result - nice pastry, though definitely needs to be a bit thinner, hopefully allowing for a bit more mincemeat. The mincemeat was made last Christmas, with lots of cranberries, using a Nigella Lawson recipe. Yum!